Oathen (27 page)

The thrumming: such a comforting sound. Like a
mother’s heartbeat. Sanych lay her ear against the stone and found
it warm. But the sound she sensed within it wasn’t a human
heartbeat. It was far more ancient. Far more familiar; she smiled
in sudden recollection.

The heartbeat of the planet thrummed low and
long, a gentle pressure that spun and swirled, filling her with its
existence, overwhelming her tiny, subjective mind with its eternal,
life-sustaining magnificence. All her strivings were motes in a
sunset breeze. Her mortal fear was a lightning strike, come and
gone. Her tears, the flash flood of a moment. But this new
force—caressing her soul, mesmerizing her mind like a glorious
vision of paradise at the end of a barren, dusty journey—this would
be hers forever.

Sanych’s eyes snapped open. Her lungs inhaled
of their own accord, and every nerve in her body tingled. The
visions that swam past her eyes might have dizzied a lesser mind,
but to her they sang of light and heat. They sang of
power.

The force of the earth built up within her,
reaching every fiber of her being. The pressure of the visions and
ideas in her head became too much to bear. Sanych opened her mouth
and shrieked, a long, high note that climbed even higher,
surprising everyone else in the room.

Especially the man who had cast a spell of
silence on her. “Hold her! Something’s not right!” he
shouted.

“Sanych! Sanych!” Voices called to her, but
she did not, could not, heed them.

Many hands pressed her down against the rock.
It seemed to absorb her being, to throb in time with her own
heartbeat. She clenched her fists and laughed with sheer ecstasy.
All pain was gone, replaced with a throbbing confidence. She was
light and power, brilliance, earth and grace, and nothing could
impede her will.

Her ropes fell away, mere charred bits of ash.
The guards’ voices mumbled in dull surprise.

Stop touching me.

A brilliant flash blazed somewhere above her,
and the hands left her skin and clothing. She tumbled from the
stone mound and got to her feet, still feeling the slow throb of
the earth. The sensation it created in her mind was not unlike the
way Meena’s shielding had affected her. With a relaxed smile, she
looked around the room, seeing Rhona’s shocked stare echoed on the
other captives’ faces. The bald man gaped at her from behind her
shackled friends.

Oh, and nearby there were some men with
serrated swords who seemed eager to kill her.

She threw her hands forward to ward off their
approach. A vast wave of white light flashed from her hands,
washing over them, knocking them to the floor. The all-pervasive
feeling of relaxation receded as she gasped in wonder and stared at
her hands, which appeared perfectly normal.

There was a commotion at the stone door;
Sanych couldn’t see it from in the pit, but the clashing of swords
was unmistakable.

It’s Meena
, she thought, smiling
through the power of her throbbing magic.
Just like she
said.

~~~

“Enforcers! Detain her, but do not kill her!”
Bailik shouted, having decided to avoid a frontal attack on the new
spellcaster. A dozen black-clad men ran past him into the
pit.

The short girl flung her hands out at them as
well. This time a solid beam of white light pierced a hole through
one man’s chest, killing him instantly.

The other guards hesitated, swords in hand, as
the girl again stared at her hands.

Now
. Bailik stretched his hand toward
her.

~~~

A heavy weight dragged Sanych to the floor;
she could not resist the urge to crumple to the floor next to the
stone mound that supported Rhona. The bald man stood at the lip of
the pit again, arm extended at her in a determined gesture of
control.

“Your blood will not be wasted on spilling
secrets now, little spellcaster,” he called to her. “I’ll partake
of it myself, and make your gift mine!”

A thunderous roar boomed through the enclosed
cavern, and a flying green vine wriggled through the air, slapping
the baton-wielding cultist on the arm and staggering
him.

Sanych felt the crushing pressure let up. She
reached for Rhona’s ropes, hoping to get one untied before the man
applied his spell again. To her horror, a burst of bright heat
blasted out from her hand, burning the rope instantly, along with
Rhona’s wrist. The pirate cried out in pain.

“I’m sorry,” Sanych blurted. “It’s so
powerful…”

“No need to show me twice,” Rhona blurted,
eyes wide.

Despite the pirate’s protests, Sanych aimed a
single finger at the ropes binding Rhona’s feet, but before she
could release her magic, the dozen approaching guards were upon
her. Panicking, she flared her fingers at them all, and they
staggered back from the brightness she manifested. The smell of
charred flesh nearly made her gag.

“Stop, girl!” their captor called down to her.
“Your magic is new and wild. You cannot hope to control it.
Surrender now, and I’ll spare your fr—”

A burst of blue fire exploded against his
back. He staggered, nearly falling into the pit, before collapsing
to the stone floor. Sanych rolled to her feet, grabbing a loose
dagger and cutting through the ropes that held Rhona.

“Sanych!? What’s going on?” Salvor
shouted.

She turned to see her three friends still
shackled, struggling to break their chains. Other figures ran into
the room behind them, dressed in what passed for everyday work
clothes in Shanal: knee-length belted tunics and baggy pants. Some
of them wielded magic as they fought off the cult guards, shoving
them away with blasts of water or flame. One directed focused
sounds that made the guards clap their ears in agony and fall to
the floor. Another began controlling the fire in the braziers,
directing it to flare out and attack the guards.

More Enforcers ran down the ramp toward Sanych
and Rhona. A couple of them stopped to check on their leader, but
most, enraged and howling, pounded toward the women.

Geret flung himself headfirst off the edge
into the pit. His chains were just long enough to reach over the
lip of the wall, where they pulled his arms up short. Geret
somersaulted, ending up dangling against the face of the wall by
his wrists.

“Climb me, hurry!” he shouted. Above him,
their invading rescuers began to free Ruel and Salvor’s wrists with
a combination of icy magic and large mallets.

“Sanych, now!” Rhona said, taking the
Archivist’s hand as she started to raise her palm to the oncoming
guards.

Sanych ran with her to Geret and scrambled up
his person, ignoring his grunts of discomfort and the fact that her
shirt was impersonating a sash. Several helpful hands aided them to
the top of the pit and pulled Geret up afterward. Arrows, blue
bolts of magic fire and cones of invisible force peppered the
enemies in the pit and near the doorway. One of the rescuers
touched Geret’s chains with a finger that froze the links to an icy
white, and a woman slammed her mallet on them, shattering the metal
into tiny shards.

“We’ll get the bracelets off later,” she said
to the freed prisoners. “We need to get out now, or we’ll get
trapped and overwhelmed by Enforcers from the warrens
below.”

Urgent hands pushed them toward the bronze
doors. Sanych nearly tripped over the bodies of several unconscious
or dead Enforcers as she hurried with the others into the wide
stone hallway. In the frenzied jumble of bodies, someone thrust an
inside-out shirt into her arms, and she pulled it on with
gratitude. She glanced over at Rhona and saw her pulling on Ruel’s
shirt.

There were so many bodies, Sanych couldn’t see
which one was Meena.

“A breath of patience, outlanders,” said a
wiry man with a bright shock of silver hair, “we’ll be free of this
place soon.”

More than twenty people surrounded them and
herded them up the sloping corridor. Their hands held swords or
aimed empty palms, ready to defend their desire to exit. They took
a left and ran up a wide stone staircase, then entered a series of
dark stone corridors before bursting out through an old wooden door
and into the crisp air of early morning.

A cool mist lay thick across the ground,
partially obscuring a large garden thick with new spring shoots. A
well sat nearby, its rope askew. Sanych breathed in the strange
scents of the Shanallese countryside as the group dashed across the
garden and into a copse of newly-leafed trees.

As they reached the shaded copse, over twenty
horses appeared out of thin air, standing calmly before them, and a
young man stepped forward and greeted the rescuers and their
charges.

“Nohm, any problems?” the silver-haired man
asked.

“No, Ahm. No one here but us forest mice.” He
mimed a nibbling mouse. “No one’s paid us any mind at
all.”

“Perfect.”

“Meena’s not here,” Sanych commented in
Versal. The thrumming that had begun in the chamber below was still
echoing within her. It had faded somewhat, but she couldn’t muster
much concern over the Shanallar’s absence.

One of the men handed Geret a long vest, and
Sanych realized belatedly that she was wearing her prince’s
shirt—and that he’d discarded all of Rhona’s swag sometime before
getting captured. The Kazhbor medallion no longer graced his
chest.

“Don’t worry,” Ruel replied, also in Vinten.
He held a cloth to his head wound; apparently the bald cultist had
reopened the injury the pirate had received in the night. “She’ll
be joining us soon, full of her next plan. You just
wait.”

“I don’t know about that,” Salvor added.
“These people weren’t in her last plan.”

“Not in the version you heard, anyway,” Rhona
said, shooting a glance at Sanych.

“We’ll get you to safety,” Ahm said. Several
Shanallese brought sleek, long-legged horses forward, and the
prisoners mounted up, each with an escort riding beside them. “But
first we need to lose our pursuers; they’ll be along momentarily,
and they’ll soon realize that illusory mice don’t wear boots or
horseshoes.”

As if on cue, the old wooden door burst open,
and a score of black-clad men and women darted out. Nohm’s
enchantment must still have been in place, because the pursuers
didn’t seem to see their quarry standing in full view directly
ahead of them. As they were distracted by prints in the garden’s
soil, they became easy prey for the numerous magical and mundane
attacks that shot their way, dropping every last one of them to the
ground.

Before the last body had stopped twitching,
all the horses had scattered across the slope of the forested hill
at full gallop, leaving trails behind them in a dozen directions.
Just as Sanych glanced back in concern, a spell sparkled into
existence in the copse they’d recently occupied. Its greenish-blue
twirl evanesced in midair, rotated once, and then burst into a
thousand little flashes that whirled away, tracking her and her
escort’s fleeing horses and erasing every single hoof print a
moment after it was created.

This is going to take some getting used
to
, she thought.

Sanych and the woman with her rode down the
steep slope toward the city. At the foot of the wide, rolling hill,
Cish’s enameled-tile roofs gleamed like a scattering of turquoise
stones, and the broad Emerald flowed through its center, splitting
it into two roughly equal sections. The splendor of the view and
the speed of the ride took Sanych’s breath away nearly as
completely as the realization that she was now, for better or
worse, a spellcaster. She looked over at the woman who rode
pell-mell beside her, a light brown braid bouncing off her back
with every stride of her horse. Her features reminded Sanych of the
Shanallar, and she wondered if Meena had a typical Shanallese
face.

When they’d ridden several miles with no sign
of pursuit, Sanych called, “So, where are we meeting up with
Meena?”

The woman looked over, frowning. “Who’s
Meena?”

A hard winter rain slashed against the mullioned windows
behind Anjoya’s chair. She was wearing another of the Kirthan gowns
she’d received in Yaren Fel, and the slit let in the draft. Sitting
near the hearth made up for it, though she would have preferred one
in a room that wasn’t currently hosting a political crisis whose
details were unfamiliar.

Beret Branbrey sat in a chair before the
crackling fire and listened to Count Braal Runcan’s account of the
deaths of Counts Sengril and Armala aboard the doomed Sea God
Kazhak
. Three other members of his Dictat sat with them:
Halvor Thelios, Tomar Gerzan, and Alvar Rentos.

As she understood the situation, Sengril and
Armala had conspired for years with two other Dictat members,
absent from this meeting: Stam Aponden and Giril n’Hara. The
Magister had known of their collusion before the expedition had
left Vint for Shanal. However, it seemed that only Runcan had
learned what they were actually conspiring
about
. The
Magister did not take the news well.